Archive for March 1st, 2012

In a landscape as unique and astonishing as Douro, any intervention must be very precise. That’s why the first challenge was to underline the distinctive identity of the project while carefully respecting the landscape. Each gesture had to be incisive, adapting itself to the given programme while conquering an expressiveness that could value both the built complex and the surrounding landscape. The expansion project for Quinta do Vallado included two areas of intervention – production and leisure – and a supplemental challenge: to maintain and to integrate the per-existing buildings in a new complex with a clearly contemporary vocabulary. The unification of all these purposes needed great technical precision and resulted in great simplicity, both in the use of material and in the creation of forms. This assured minimal impact to the landscape but the same economy of means was used to create very seductive spaces. Seduction of the visitor was always part of the game.

A starting point was that a new art museum, as a public and cultural building, represents a rare opportunity to create a new node within a city, changing the urban balance and developing the surrounding neighbourhood. In Malmö, a city in the south of Sweden, there was the possibility to create a new art museum with an informal and experimental character, housed within the 1900’s industrial building of the former Electricity plant, which would complement the main museum in Stockholm.

What began as a development for Enron Corp executives, a townhouse project was redesigned and re-imaged even before completion into a boutique modern hotel. It was named one of 16 hippest hotels by Dwell Magazine soon after it opened its doors.

The ‘Groupe e’ poster goals against the current, luckily, he asked the architects to imagine living spaces always becoming, places that re-qualify the individual and collective work: communication, transparency, fun at work, exchange , adaptation. Intentions infinitely precious, simple as water that nourishes life and a contemporary design because it goes against the trends of our time. On the site there – in touch – the campaign and its houses clustered, rural – on the edge – the village of Granges-Paccot and scattered houses – finally – a direct communication with the city of Fribourg.

The Vasquez Rocks Nature and Interpetive Center is a vital gateway to a unique asset in the Los Angeles County Parks system. The high-desert site is one of the most significant natural areas in the region; its sculptural rock formations have inspired generations of visitors and provided the backdrop to dozens of Hollywood movies and television shows. Its location along the Pacific Crest Trail affords hikers on a 2,650-mile walk from Mexico to Canada an unforgettable point of reference.

This house is located in a privileged area of Lisbon, at the southern end of a row of houses. This neighbourhood, built in the 1950’s by the state as social housing, in a “nationalistic” style, has a homogenous character, with the repetition of a type with slight variations, and cohesive public space, which promotes a strong sense of community that, is so hard to find in the more fragmented contemporary city.

It is our hope that this building will represent the aspirations of our time and that history will remember us as the generation who, while confronted by terrorism and violence at home and abroad, created architecture to embody the enduring values of our democracy.

The “Lockyer House” is a small, contemporary extension onto a post war house in Bardon, a heavily treed and hilly fringe suburb in Brisbane. The design looks to address two primary architectural issues, the first is about context and language, the second is about finding the “essence” of what is needed from an accommodation/ resource perspective in an effort to create a engaging but practical and economical outcome.